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January 8, 2019

Everything You Didn’t Know About Producing Awards

Submitted by Kelly Glass

It’s award season, everybody! Get ready to see your favorite celebrities up on stage, giving speeches and brandishing awards that we normal people would be lucky to even touch, let alone win. These fancy awards — think the Emmy, Oscar, Golden Globe and even MTV’s Moon Person — are one of the biggest money makers for any promotional products company, thanks to the small batches and extremely high price points.

But if you ever want to win that business, you need to be well-informed. Vox recently interviewed David Moritz, owner of trophy manufacturer Society Awards (the company that produces almost all the major awards), about what it takes to produce those iconic statuettes. Based on that interview, here are some important things you might not know about trophy production.

They’re really expensive to make. A simple crystal shape may only run about $100 per award, but for the higher end ones — such as the Emmy and the Oscar — production can cost between $10,000 and $15,000 in set-up fees and up to $350 per statue. And the more custom the awards are, the more they cost. Moritz has produced priceless awards costing upwards of $100,000, including some with diamonds and meteorite pieces.

A lot of early design is involved. Lower-end awards and trophies are often created based on sketches, but the high-end ones have a lengthy design process. It starts with an interview with the clients. What is their vision? What are the awards for? What message are they supposed to send? At Society Awards, Moritz says they then get deep into the design process, using computer programs to make ultra-realistic, three-dimensional renderings of each award. It’s designed so thoroughly early on that you feel like you can reach into the computer screen and pull it out.

There are guidelines to make awards versus sculpture. When artists make sculpture, they’re making it for themselves and there is only one version of something that expresses their artistic vision. But awards are different. There’s more than one (albeit still only a few) and they need to convey specific messages, represent brands and connect with the groups of people who could potentially win in a meaningful way. So, while awards need to be beautiful like pieces of art, they need to serve greater purposes and be functional.

Moritz says that awards need to be tall and slender so they can be held with one hand and have nice silhouettes in case the designs will be added to logos. Depending on the type of events, the awards should match. For example, when Society Awards creates sports awards, they’re designed to resemble trophies. The Moon Person Award looks aptly like a person in a spacesuit. Moritz’s favorite, the GLAAD Award for the (formerly named) Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, appears to be an uplifting pair of wings.